Essays
Writing in Images and Sounds
‘In hardboiled crime/detective/gangster films of the 1940s, there is often a scene where one character confronts another and hints at something unstated and highly menacing, but awesomely present in the air – usually leading to the utterance of the classic line: ‘Do I have to spell it out in words?’ This excellent phrase often comes to mind when reading the criticism devoted to almost every art form: film, painting, music, theatre, TV, sculpture. Because the dominant assumption, operative for a long time now, is that we do need to spell it all out in words – that our responses to creative works are only genuinely articulated, and furthermore legitimated, when we put them into ordered, written, rational form. ‘
On The Cartographer’s Curse
‘Each participant brought a certain cultural heft to this collective, creative, and collaborative writing process. Our distinctiveness as individuals made the process complex yet fluid: from being born and raised in the very places we had set our drama, to specialising in a particular art form, namely the Arabic qanun, or the contemporary urban movement of parkour. Together, we created a deep listening space where our shared cultural capital counted for a great deal.’